Colin Johnson’s blog

Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

The sorites (Greek for “heap”) paradox is a puzzle about language. We unambiguously use the word “heap” to represent a large pile of, say, stones—say a few hundred. If we remove one, that is still, uncomplicatedly, a heap. Yet, we cannot do this indefinitely. Once we have, say, two stones, everyone agrees that this is clearly not a heap. The usual resolution to this is to argue that concepts such as “heap” are irreducibly vague; there will always be a fuzzy middle ground between “heap” and “non-heap”.

Interestingly, there are still examples of this at very small scales. There is currently a proposal to merge two of the small number of supermarket chains in the UK. At present, most people would agree that the current system is decently competitive. Reduce is by one and—well, is it still a competitive system? Interestingly, this shows that a sorites-like situation can exist with small numbers of objects, and so perhaps isn’t a problem of fine-grainedness as much as we might first think.

I think that where I get into dispute with the social scientists and literary theorists about whether the world is “ordered” is basically down to the counterfactuals we are each thinking of. To them, the fact that sometimes some people can’t quite manage to agree that some words mean the same thing means that the world is fundamentally disordered and truth uncertain and subjective. Whereas to me, I’m constantly gobsmacked that the world isn’t just some isotropic soup of particles and energy, and regard it as amazing that we can even write down some equations that describe at least some aspects of the world to a reasonable level of accuracy, and that by some amazing happenstance the most compact description of the world isn’t just a rote list of particles and their position and momentum.

Thinking about the basis for moral action as a result of Stuart Sutherland’s interesting lecture earlier this evening on “Hume and Civil Society”. Hume skeptically examines various putative bases for moral action, and finds many of them wanting—religion, social norms, rational thought.

I was wondering whether, in practice, there is a single “base theory” like this, though. Perhaps there are a number of different bases, and the consequences of these all largely coincide. Groups might seem to be acting in a coherent moral fashion, but each individual’s morality might have a different basis; or, more likely, combination of bases. Some might be driven by emotional repugnance, some by rationally thinking through the consequences of their action, some by social norms, some by fear of (spiritual or temporal) authority, most by some mixture of them all. In the end they all do more-or-less the same thing. This has a flavour of the “swiss cheese” theory of risk: most of the time at least one of our moral bases kick in to prevent us acting immorally, and it is only when all of the bases are absent, or else miscued in a particular context, that morality fails.